Monday, June 22, 2015

Last Thursday, I was honored to give a keynote for the Literacy Council of Northern Virginia at their annual recognition event. The Literacy Council is an amazing group of volunteers who provide basic reading, writing, speaking and English comprehension to empower people to participate more fully in their neighborhoods and larger communities. In addition to the speech I was privileged to give, I got to hear some of the award-winning essays written by the program's participants, and read more in the event program. And it was truly humbling and uplifting.
The event meant a lot to me, because I came to this country unable to speak English. My parents learned English at night while working and trying to raise a family, and they did it for the same reason that moved me in the essays the students shared at LCNV--because they wanted freedom, opportunity, and the hope for a better life for their children.

Working Harder

When you hear that someone who was a nurse, or a teacher for 22 years, and they give that up to start all over again, you realize the value of what we have here. It makes me count the many blessings I have, and want to dig in even harder with my writing. And it makes me want to pay it forward, because I've been so very, very lucky.

I never imagined getting to work on the Heirs of Watson Island series with Simon Pulse, and I never imagined how big this blog would get.

Paying it Forward

For five years now, Adventures blog has been a place where I've been able to share not only my thoughts about writing and insight about what I'm learning, but also insight and advice from many other authors. Because I believe you can't be a writer without being a reader, we've shared new book releases each week, author interviews, and giveaways. We've launched the First Five Pages Workshop, and spun off a new writing contest site to help writers get agented and get their work polished for submission, and I've also been fortunate to work on a separate venture called YASeriesInsiders.com with a cast of amazing authors. As Adventures has grown, I've been lucky to find some amazing new contributors to bring in, and we now have an INCREDIBLE team.

Welcome New Arrivals

When we went hunting for one intern a few weeks ago, we received so many submissions that we ended up creating positions for a lot of people. As a result, AYAP has a brand new set of social media channels!

More Intern and Contributor Opportunities

In addition to adding new people here at Adventures, we've also added contributors for Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest at http://www.YASeriesInsiders.com, as well as a new Contributor and Interview Coordinator. And we're still interested in adding people. We're going to be tying in the content a bit more with Adventures, so that means even more great interviews and giveaways, but also lots of fun ways to express our love of books from the reader side of the equation.

If you'd like to be considered, please send your resume to yaseriesinsiders (at) gmail dot com.

This Week's Giveaway

The Wrath and the Dawnby Renée AhdiehHardcoverG.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young ReadersReleased 5/12/2015

A sumptuous and epically told love story inspired by A Thousand and One Nights

Every dawn brings horror to a different family in a land ruled by a killer. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, takes a new bride each night only to have her executed at sunrise. So it is a suspicious surprise when sixteen-year-old Shahrzad volunteers to marry Khalid. But she does so with a clever plan to stay alive and exact revenge on the Caliph for the murder of her best friend and countless other girls. Shazi's wit and will, indeed, get her through to the dawn that no others have seen, but with a catch . . . she’s falling in love with the very boy who killed her dearest friend.

She discovers that the murderous boy-king is not all that he seems and neither are the deaths of so many girls. Shazi is determined to uncover the reason for the murders and to break the cycle once and for all.

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LOVE FOR TWO LIFETIMES by MARTINA BOONE

Everything, Everything meets Nicholas Sparks: Chasing clues in her mother’s unsent love letters, Izzy steps into a world of English royalty to find her father and falls in love with a young aristocrat—only to discover he may be her brother...

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March 1st 5 Pages Workshop

The March 1st 5 Pages workshop will open for submissions on Saturday, March 7 at noon, ET. It's a great opportunity for selected participants to be mentored by three published authors through three rounds of revisions and to receive additional feedback from our literary agent mentor on their first five pages and their pitch. The agent mentor will select the best of the five manuscripts in the workshop and offer additional feedback to the author, and perhaps to additional participants.

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To keep subscribers from getting inundated by posts, we've moved our agent-judged writing contests off to Adventures in YA Contests, a separate site just for AdventuresInYAPubilshing.com contests. Stay tuned for a new contest starting soon!

AdventuresInYAPublishing.com sometimes receives books for free from publishers or authors in the hope that we will mention them on the blog, but otherwise we receive no compensation for writing posts or content on this site. We have no material connections to the brands, products, or services mentioned, except those by individual site members in their capacity as authors. Our posts often include convenient links, and a small commission may be paid on some of these if you purchase the item after clicking. We use the income from this and from sidebar advertising to help defray the costs of postage for mailing books to giveaway winners. Inclusion of a book on the site does not imply an endorsement unless the individual who authored the post specifically states that they have personally read the book or believes the product or service mentioned will add value to our readers.